Artist-in-Residence at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Artist Ingrid Calame installed Secular Response 2A.J., 2003, as part of the 2005 exhibition Extreme Abstraction at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Ingrid Calame at work on From #258 Drawing, 2007. Photo: Shelby Roberts. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, NY.

Ingrid Calame traces evidence of human presence in the form of stains, graffiti, tire tracks, and more anonymous marks on sidewalks, floors, walls, and other surfaces. She collects her tracings and combines them with the actual floor plans of places that interest her and layers them into paintings and drawings that look like colorful abstractions but are really one-to-one scale representations of real things. She has created works in places such as the New York Stock Exchange, the streets of Las Vegas, the Indianapolis Speedway, a planetarium, and a church.

Born in 1965, Ingrid Calame is best known for her artworks based on tracings of stains and marks found on city streets and sidewalks that she transposes onto museum walls. Calame visited Buffalo in September 2007 with her husband and baby daughter, Willa, to begin planning her project, Step on a Crack.... Assisted by Gallery staff, she visited various industrial sites to select places to focus her Buffalo-based paintings. The land surrounding the hydroelectric plants of Niagara Falls, the abandoned grain elevators, and the swath of industrial buildings, both in use and abandoned, in and around Buffalo are a few of the areas Calame is considering.

For Calame, "All of these places are fraught with the issues of struggling powers and changing industries. Niagara Falls is both a natural wonder tourist attraction and a source of hydroelectric power and industry. The grain elevators are sites of agricultural industry (and nostalgia) being displaced by the industry of a casino run by the Seneca Indian Nation. The aging and abandoned industrial buildings are crumbling icons of the past steel boom."

In May and June of 2008, Calame and a group of assistants, all of them local artists and students, traced marks left at the selected sites and created a template footprint of the buildings. Back in her studio in Los Angeles, the tracings have resulted in the artworks that will be featured in an exhibition at the Albright-Knox. The exhibition, on view September 25, 2009 through February 28, 2010, will be accompanied by an audio tour and materials designed to engage visitors with the artist's work, her ideas, and the ways in which the work connects to the Buffalo community.

The Artist-in-Residence Program (AIR) is made possible with major funding from the MetLife Foundation Museums and Community Connections Program and through the generous support of Sandy and Margie Nobel.